Thursday, January 10, 2008

Two Graveyard Poems

In keeping with the omnipresent themes of death and graveyards here (and because I like them), I post these poems by a friend. They were written by Jennifer Horne and published in her collection, “Miss Betty’s School of Dance,” produced by Amy Stecher in a limited edition of 50 at the University of Alabama’s Book Arts program in 1997. “Est. 1846” first appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review.
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EST. 1846

Rain last night,
cool and steady,
washed our headstones free of guile.
Wet dawn, first–graders stand,
mothers in tow, at the bus stop.
The stones expose our plainness
to each other, reveal our names:
Young, Stark, Fair, Hart.
The children are immune to plainness.

If the crabapple trees drip
in awkward disarray,
only the mother in curlers
who observes these things
will mark it.
One pale child
watches the sun arrive,
yellow, expansive,
his memory of the beach.

The bus pulls away
and the mothers let it go.
We scatter across the graveyard
and wait for 3 p.m.

If a body is buried today,
and it is, machinery creaking,
the ground will be solid again
before the bus chuffs heavily
into view.
The line of cars,
a string of lights,
will break apart, like nothing.
No one will linger––they have work to do.

The day puts on playclothes,
takes up its jumprope.
We want to tell the children
about centuries, and our favorite pets.
But they know so little.
We cannot tell them
what they face.
Though we are face to face
each morning, we cannot tell them.

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Running Laps Around the Cemetery

The funny thing is,
death isn’t what you think about,
running your laps
around the graveyard’s perfect mile.
Instead, it’s a mockingbird,
rich smell of earth,
yellow flowers strewn
across the green expanse like stars.

The dead are good sports.
You’ve beat them once again.
You haven’t tripped once
or caught your head in a branch.
You wonder: does a crowd
await you at the finish?
Is anybody cheering you on
in your solitary run?

––––
Jennifer Horne is the editor of Working the Dirt: An Anthology of Southern Poets (2003) and co-editor, with Wendy Reed, of All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (2006).